樱花菜市场 Cherry Blossom Wet Market, Pudong

Cherry blossom wet market in Pudong

Back in Singapore I am fond of wet markets especially for the food stalls that would usually be found in them. Over here in Shanghai, I have been putting off visiting one since I wasn't sure if I could stomach the food if there were any, and I do prefer to do my grocery shopping nowadays in air-conditioned comfort.

You see propaganda inciting the use of polite language in the market

View of ground floor from the escalator

But the kids' school organised a wet market tour recently and I thought that it could be an interesting outing for the MIL. We were led by a Shanghainese-American mother who fed us horrifying tales about pesticide-filled vegetables, hormone-injected meat, pork masquerading as beef, gutter frying oil - and she concluded by informing us that she wouldn't risk eating any seafood in China. Apparently they made trips to Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore when they felt like eating any.

Quite a large choice in soy products

So we visited the 樱花菜市场 somewhere in Pudong. Was surprised to see that the market was quite clean, the stalls tidy and bad odours limited mainly to the live fowl section (also the abattoir) which was housed in a separate annexe next to the market. Didn't take any pictures of the latter as I couldn't live with the smell and had to run out in a flash, faster than you can say "chicken".

A butcher

One of the vegetable/fruit stalls

The wet market was divided into 2 floors, the upper floor containing mainly rice, toy and clothing stalls. The ground floor was divided into fresh vegetable/fruit, cooked food (take-away only), soy products, preserved products, meat and seafood. There was also a guy preparing fresh dumplings and egg dumplings for sale, they actually looked quite nice - if you could trust his meat filling.

Cooked food : a lot of weird stuff if you ask me. See the pigs' snouts?

I wasn't inspired to make any purchase, probably lost any desire after taking a look at the cooked food section, plus the fruits and vegetables somehow looked unnaturally big and juicy at most stalls. MIL and I started to wander away from the group because we were bad at following, lacked concentration etc. Outside there were mobile vegetable and fruit sellers as well as a few stalls selling fried food - but thinking of the gutter frying oil of course I didn't buy anything.

Crab season'll be here soon

From the look of things I'll have to stick to my expensive supermarkets with their imported food sections. There are of course many ways to die, but hopefully I would be able to avoid some form of acute food poisoning until we somehow manage to build up more resistance. Plus I do not derive any pleasure from shopping at the local wet markets, unlike the bliss I usually feel when I visit European ones.